Rockefeller Stands Up for Liberals on Health Care

WASHINGTON — On Tuesday, John D. Rockefeller IV, a leading Senate liberal on health issues, said he would oppose a new Democratic proposal intended to win elusive Republican support to remake the health system. On Wednesday, he was summoned to a private meeting with President Obama.

After months in which the White House had seemed to ignore liberals as it courted centrists to join the president’s signature cause, liberal lawmakers have finally attracted the administration’s attention. They, in turn, have to decide how far to press their case.

All summer, the White House deferred to Senator Max Baucus, the Democrat from Montana who heads the Senate Finance Committee, as he negotiated with two moderate Democrats and three Republicans. Their failure to agree on a bipartisan bill left the administration scrambling to pass an overhaul with Democratic votes alone.

And that has emboldened liberals like the 72-year-old Mr. Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat. He heads the health subcommittee of Mr. Baucus’s panel, and yet he was relegated to the sidelines as the so-called Gang of Six talked and talked. Senate liberals are now pushing for an overhaul fully on Democratic terms — legislation more like that in the House, where liberal Democrats dominate.

“I represent a state that really needs health care reform, and I want it to be good,” said Mr. Rockefeller, who came to West Virginia 45 years ago with the Vista program to teach in a mining town. “It doesn’t make me liberal,” he added. “I care. That’s the Vista volunteer in me. My passion has not diminished one bit since 1964.”

Compared with the Baucus bill, a liberal package would include more generous subsidies for working-class families and small businesses to buy coverage.

The White House is quietly reassuring liberals that the subsidies will be increased. But it is giving no such assurance about a public option, a government-sponsored insurance plan to compete with private insurers in new markets called exchanges, where the uninsured would shop.

Republicans and some moderate Democrats are united against a public option, calling it a first step to a government takeover of the insurance industry.

That is why a Baucus compromise without a public option was widely expected to have a better chance of passage than bills from four other Congressional panels. But proponents are mobilizing.

Mr. Rockefeller, who told reporters Tuesday that “the way it is now, there’s no way I can vote for the Senate package,” said Wednesday that other Democrats on the Finance Committee had “thanked me for doing that because it’s something they might want to do.”

He refused in an interview on Thursday to discuss his conversation with Mr. Obama, except to say that he had outlined his complaints about the Baucus bill and his plans to seek changes.

Photo

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV on Thursday in a meeting with his staff on health care.Credit
Brendan Smialowski for The New York Times

But Mr. Rockefeller had quietly acquiesced in being out of Mr. Baucus’s loop in the first place, along with other prominent Democrats on the Finance Committee, including Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts and Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York.

That reflects their conundrum: the more liberals push legislation to their liking, the more they risk splintering the party, costing Mr. Obama the support of more conservative Democrats vulnerable to Republican challengers in next year’s midterm elections, and perhaps dooming his initiative.

Their recognition of that risk decreases the liberals’ leverage in the intraparty jockeying under way, though they outnumber more conservative Democrats. The White House expects that liberals are more likely to support the final package because they generally are party loyalists. That is especially true of Mr. Rockefeller, who was in Congress when President Bill Clinton’s health care bill failed in 1994 and Democrats subsequently lost their majorities in both houses.

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Mr. Obama, mindful of concerns about the overhaul among moderate voters who helped elect him, has already signaled his support for major aspects of the scaled-down Baucus package, including the proposal for consumer-owned insurance cooperatives in the states.

While no one expects Mr. Rockefeller to be a spoiler, he is fighting back to shape the product, exploiting his long familiarity with the complexities of health policy.

“Somebody needs to look at the overall package at some point and ask, ‘What’s happening to people in the lower-middle class, the working stiffs, the working poor?’ ” said John D. Podesta, a former White House chief of staff under Mr. Clinton who now heads the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning research group. “I think at the end of the day, he’ll be a powerful force for that.”

Shut out in the Finance Committee until now, Mr. Rockefeller has used his chairmanship of the Senate Commerce Committee to stoke the debate for changes in insurance. In June, he held a widely publicized hearing featuring a former Cigna insurance-executive-turned-whistle-blower who testified about industry practices like purging policyholders who become sick.

On Wednesday, he released a Commerce Committee report questioning the feasibility of insurance co-ops and took it to the White House.

“I urge my colleagues to seriously consider this troubling new information before hanging their hats — and most importantly the livelihoods of millions of Americans — on an untested concept,” Mr. Rockefeller said in a statement.

He predicted that Mr. Baucus’s tax on insurers for their most generous policies would translate into higher premiums for union workers with good coverage, like coal miners. He also objects to Mr. Baucus’s proposal to incorporate the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, which benefits children of the working poor, into the new insurance exchanges.

Unlike most liberals, who are from Democratic bastions where Mr. Obama is popular, Mr. Rockefeller represents a state that has turned Republican in his quarter-century in the Senate. Mr. Obama lost badly among its working-class voters in the Democratic primary last year and general election, and remains suspect in their view, polls show.

But Mr. Rockefeller, the great-grandson and namesake of the founder of Standard Oil, won his fifth term last November with 64 percent of the vote.

“Because he cares a lot and he’s pretty passionate, he wears his emotions on his sleeve a bit more than some might,” said Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader who served on the finance panel with Mr. Rockefeller. “And he feels he has a right after all these years to be heard on the most important issue of the day.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Rockefeller Stands Up for Liberals on Health Care. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe